The Starlink service can provide community Internet for 100's or 1000’s of people

Internet is now available for rural and remote communities

People in most parts of the world have access to the Internet in urban areas, however many large rural areas have no access to the Internet. This difference of Internet services between urban and rural areas is great in many countries of Africa. Many of the islands in Oceania have no Internet service connecting the islands.

Satellite Internet is available via Starlink at the present time and is providing the Internet service for rural areas of Africa and for islands in Oceania. Although the cost of the Starlink service is much higher than a community individual could afford, sharing one service with a community makes the cost affordable for each community member at a few cents per day.

Starlink was designed to provide Internet for a family home; communities have adapted the service to provide Internet for residents, using Guest Internet controllers to share a Starlink connection with many residents. One Starlink antenna can provide an Internet service for 100 to 150 people concurrently, when rules and controls are applied to the service. This represents a community of 500 to 1000 people.

Additional Starlink antennas for larger communities

One important aspect of Guest Internet controllers is the feature to connect Internet users via multiple ISP services. The connection of multiple ISP's to a Guest Internet controller is shown in the next diagram. The controller provides load balance and fail-over. Load balance means that the connections of all users are shared between the ISP’s. Fail-over means that if one ISP connection fails then users are moved to the working ISP.

Community Internet for up to 600 people at the same time

A community WiFi Internet service is designed for the maximum number of people who will connect to the Internet at the same time. The community will be larger than the maximum number of people using the service at one time. For example, a community of 1000 residents might have a maximum of 100 people connected to the Internet at the same time. The Guest Internet controller sets limits to the number of people and how each person can access the Internet. The next diagram shows four configurations with 1, 2, 3 and 4 Starlink antennas. Each multi-Starlink configuration has load balance and fail-over.

Community WiFi Internet to provide a service for tens of thousands of people

Very large-scale citywide WiFi Internet services can be built by adding more of the configurations shown previously. A citywide system can have groups of four Starlink antennas at points around the city. Not more than four antennas should be installed at one location, as all four antennas will communicate with the same satellite. Adding more Starlink antennas at the same location will reduce the overall data speed. By installing antenna clusters in different locations, each cluster may connect with a different satellite.
 
An example of multiple antenna clusters was installed in the city of Mogadishu, in Somalia. Mogadishu has a population of 2.5 million people. Over 50 Guest Internet controllers are installed in different locations, with each controller connected to between two and four Starlink antennas. Well over 100 Starlink antennas are installed to provide the WiFi Internet for the city residents. Residents pay for the low cost WiFi Internet service using Mobile Money. The next diagram illustrates the network installation.

Recovering the cost of deploying a community Internet service

The ISP Internet service has a cost. The monthly service for one Starlink antenna is over $100 and can increase with high data usage. Sharing one Starlink connection with many people lowers the cost of the service for each person. The charge per person will be a few cents per day. The charge depends on the infrastructure investment and the level of service permitted for each user. The Guest Internet controller sets limits for each user so that more people can access the system; the access method is called on-demand with access authorized using codes, where each code has the following parameters.

• Duration of access permitted, e.g. 1hour, 1 day, etc
• Maximum permitted download and upload data speeds (in Mbits/sec).
• Maximum permitted download and upload data volumes (number of bytes).
• Number of people permitted to use the access code (the default is 1 person).

The Guest Internet controller provides several methods to collect payments from users. The service is pre-paid; the user pays for the service before getting access to the Internet. Payments can be collected using one or more of the following methods.

• Printing and sale of vouchers that have access codes.
• Charge online using credit or debit cards.
• Charge online using Mobile Money (available throughout Africa).
• Charge via a Telco billing system.
• Etc.

The Guest Internet cloud has an API that is used by third-party billing systems so that any charging method can be used with the Guest Internet WiFi Internet service.

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